For the past 4-5 years, Local county governments use services for monitoring short term rental violations and non-payment of rental tax.
That said, I’ve noticed a huge uptick in the last 2 years in the multifamily space where residents are listing out their unit on AirBNB/VRBO. I’ve seen residents get very creative when creating listings to avoid detection.
It became such an issue for a few of our larger complexes (300+ units), it was effecting our lease renewal rate and of course, residents leaving 1 star reviews.
With my past experience in local gov rental compliance monitoring, we felt it was worth creating a system specifically for multifamily.
Like others said, it’s extremely time consuming. And difficult to detect in more serious cases. All you can do is go through the hassle of scouring rental apps/sites as a secret shopper.
The system we created to automate a lot of this is in-house, I’d be interested to know if any larger property management firms are running into similar issues.